I must admit, getting an iPhone has changed my media consumption habits a great deal. Pre-iPhone I would always have my iPod with me to listen to music, but that is all I would do. Now that I have my iPhone, I still listen to music from the iPod feature and stream music, but I also actually watch movies. Even though I had an iPod video before my iPhone I never watched videos on it; the screen was simply too small.

I am always on the hunt for software that makes my life easier, and I have finally found the holy grail of simple video conversion: Evom.

Before I found Evom, I was using HandBrake. HandBrake is “an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.” I will be the first to admit that HandBrake can handle pretty much any video thrown out it (and it’s free!), but it is definitely not “drag and drop.” I am sure a lot of users love the ability to tweak every little video setting, but I simply do not care. I want to drag a video into the program and completely forget about it. Enter Evom.

Converting a video is a two-step process: Select or drag movies, folders, or links into Evom, and then select your destination. If your destination is your iPod, Evom will automatically import the video into your iTunes library. Next time I sync my iPhone, my files are already there waiting for me, which is great because I usually load my iPhone with videos the night before traveling while I am trying to pack, so having my videos ready to go is a great time saver.

Another cool feature of Evom is the browser bookmarklet. Add the Evom bookmarklet to your browser, and you get one-click-downloading on flash video sites like YouTube.

As you can probably tell, I love the simplicity of Evom and am very excited for the final version to be released; however, Evom is currently in beta. There is no price listed on Evom’s web site, but after poking around in the preferences of the current version, it is clearly going to be a paid application. Unfortunately, when I clicked the “Buy a License” button in the preferences section of Evom I was brought to a broken URL, so I have no actual evidence of what the application will cost when the developers take the software out of beta.

It should be noted that a single user license of iPod Rip, the software that lets you copy music and movies off your iPod onto your computer that was developed by the same company, costs $19.95, so I would guess that Evom would be priced similarly.

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Convert, an app for converting an array of different units, looks great and, in theory, should be quite useful. Unfortunately, the bad outweighs the good on this one.

The iPhone isn’t just about gaming and entertainment. Admittedly, I’ve got two screens worth of music and gaming apps, another screen for news, books and recipes, and then a screen dedicated to file-sharing and chat.

On my fifth and final screen, however, is a selection of software tools. There’s the basics, like Calculator and WeDict, sat alongside GPS-tools such as Locly and HearPlanet. Until now though, there was no unit converter.

The clever people at Polar Bear Farm have created Convert, a unit conversion tool that marries a variety of seemingly esoteric units — to the layman — with a polished interface.

With quite a history behind them, having launched in 2007, Polar Bear Farm is no strangers to app development. Notable past releases included Nice List, a stylish holiday gift manager, and Note Pad, a replacement to the iPhone’s own Notes app, upping the game with graphical flair and desktop syncing.

Then there’s Telegram, filling the iPhone voice-messaging void by allowing users to send short audio messages to each other.

The point is, Polar Bear Farm is an app developer who seems to specialize in creating tools that manage data and make life easier. And what’s more, these tools are always visually stunning.

Units and Values

Moving on to Convert, the most exciting thing when first opening the app is the aesthetic. It’s not at all iPhone-esque — gone is the Apple-aesthetic we all adore. Instead is a reductionist approach — metallic and digital, calling to mind expensive electronic tools created for specialists.

This may not be too far from the truth though as, while the app is indeed visually stunning, it also seems to pack in an array of esoteric units for converting. The units are separated in to ten different classes: Angle, Area, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Speed, Temperature, Time and Volume.

All the basics are present and correct too, so entering the Length section will bring up Inches, Kilometers, Miles and Feet, among other conversion options. Notably, however, the app does not convert currency, something which — as an iPhone user who travels frequently — would have proved incredibly useful.

Perhaps more importantly, the app incorporates a diverse range of less commonly-used unit-types, such as radians, nautical miles, and drams. Unfortunately, Delorean owners will be disappointed to find that there is no option to convert Gigawatts.

Although the UI isn’t quite as intuitive as it should be, the actual conversion process is incredibly easy. Select the unit to convert from and then the unit to convert to, then tap the numbers on either side of the equation, enter the new figure and instantaneously the equation adjusts to display your answer.

Comparing Problems

When I initially heard about the app’s $1.99 price tag, I felt somewhat unsure, questioning whether a unit converter is really worth two bucks. For my own conversions, I use Google. It’s free to use, although admittedly somewhat clunky on the iPhone and requiring a data connection.

In comparing Convert to Google’s calculator, I discovered a couple of interesting anomalies. When numbers are displayed, it always expresses them in full, so 596 days in microseconds would be 51,494,400,000,000.

There are, of course, shorter ways of expressing the same value. Google’s calculator outputs 596 days as 5.14944 × 10^13 microseconds (see it here displayed properly). The issue is further compounded with even larger numbers — Convert doesn’t seem to like really big numbers, in fact. It seems if a number is too big for the display, nothing at all is shown. As such, converting 596 days to nanoseconds leaves the display blank (whereas Google has no trouble).

The point is that the tool should be able to handle these kind of equations and express the outputted value clearly to the user. Convert seems to have been designed as much for the layman as for Make enthusiast or even coders and physicists. Esoteric units of measurement are all well and good, but the app should be able to handle esoteric equations too.

Furthermore, there’s some notable competition on sale in the App Store. One app in particular, The Converter, packs in a serious amount of units for converting, including currency conversion too, for 99 cents. However, The Converter (and all of the other conversion apps on offer) certainly aren’t as aesthetically impressive as Convert. I just don’t know if a pretty user interface is enough to warrant an extra buck, though.

Summing Up

With its appropriately stylized visual, so much work seems to have gone in to creating an app that looks professionally produced. The sound design is excellent as well. The app clicks and bleeps just at the right time, giving a satisfying level of tangibility to this digital tool.

However, there seem to be a couple of drawbacks to an app that could be accused of putting form before function. Firstly, despite the range of different units on offer for conversion, in comparison to other (cheaper) apps, Convert actually only seems to provide a paltry selection. The app therefore needs an update that expands the unit library to something much more substantial.

The other issue is with the way the app displays — or occasionally doesn’t display — values. With the user interface so rigidly set as part of the design and the apps current inability to express x to the power of y, it literally leaves no room to display incredibly large numbers. I’m surprised that this issue didn’t get caught in the testing phase.

As the app currently is, despite the fact it looks so gorgeous, I really can’t recommend it. There are cheaper apps out in the store that, while they certainly don’t have the good looks, have the features and the brains to hold their own. Until this app gets a much-needed upgrade, I suggest you avoid it.

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The problem lies with getting this information onto said device. to make my life easier, I use a utility that first appeared in OS X 10.4 called textutil. As you will see, the utility of this small tool goes far beyond formatting content for eBook readers. As always, fire up Terminal.app and have it ready to roll as we delve once again down to the command line.

Formats A-Plenty

While I have a very specific and regular use-case for textutil, there are plenty of features that make it a highly useful and general purpose tool. (For most of the examples, I will be using text and HTML version of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens) The first lies in format support. textutil can convert from/to txt, html, rtf, rtfd, doc, docx, wordml, odt and webarchive. Picture a scenario where you receive a large number of HTML documents from an existing project that are just wretched and you really only need access to the raw text to begin anew. While you may have techniques for stripping HTML tags, textutil can do the heavy lifting for you with ease:

$textutil -convert txt ChristmasCarol.html

Since you can specify as many files as you like on the command line, batch processing an entire directory is just as easy:

$textutil -convert txt *.html

If you have an article broken up into many pieces and want to convert (or keep in the same format) and concatenate them into one large file just use the -cat option:

$textutil -cat html *.txt

If you have a look at the texutil manual page, you will see that you have complete control over the location, name and extension of output files and can even specify font name and style. This is very handy for my use-case since I have a certain base font size I like to use with the reader:

textutil -convert rtf -font Times -fontsize 14 ArticleToConvert.html

You also do not need to save HTML files from your browser first. The -stdin option lets you work some further command line magic (by pairing textutil with curl) to convert your data directly from the web:

$curl --silent http://slashdot.org/ | textutil -stdin -convert txt -output slashdot.txt

Metadata Madness

textutil does its best to preserve file information, but you may not want to keep such data around or you may want to modify it in some way. The -strip option clears away all metadata while the -title, -author, -subject, -comment, -editor, and -company flags all take parameters that let you specify your own values for each field. You can add your own metadata keywords via the -keywords option and even modify the creation and modification dates through -creationtime and -modificationtime flags.

Unearthing textutil From the Command Line

While dropping into Terminal.app to do some conversions is fine, it would be easier for most users if there was a more accessible way to perform conversion tasks, especially if they are somewhat routine operations. For this, we turn to the power of AppleScript and its ability to make Droplets, which are nothing more than applications that respond to specific events. Fire up Script Editor and enter the following code:

on open droppedFiles
	repeat with macFile in droppedFiles
		set unixFile to quoted form of POSIX path of macFile
		set shellScript to ("/usr/bin/textutil -convert rtf -font Times -fontsize 14 " & unixFile)
		display alert shellScript
		do shell script shellScript
	end repeat
	return
end open

Save the script as both a normal script (so you can edit it later) and then save it as an application (so you can make it a Droplet). Now you have a handy tool which you can drop any number of files on to batch convert right from the Finder. You can customize this script to perform the transformations you need and create as many droplets as you see fit.

Download the source code

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If you have installed the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 Update and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac, you can use Office 2004 applications to open and save files in the Open XML Formats that were introduced in the 2007 Microsoft Office system for Windows and in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.

To open files in the XML Format in Office 2004:

1. Download and install the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 Update Package
2. Download and install the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac package
3. Once both items are installed restart your computer just to be safe. You should now be able to open .docx with Word 2004 and other Open XML files

Note: I have not tried the following technique myself, but have been told it works. Please post results in the comments.

Another option to open Open XML Formats on a computer without Office 2008 is to convert the file down to the older format. To down convert an Open XML file:

1. Navigate to: Zamzar
2. Click “Browse” to browse your local computer to find the file you would like to convert
3. Select the format you would like to convert to



4. Enter your email address so Zamzar can send you download link for the file.
5. Wait…sometimes it takes a little while, but eventually you will get a download link for your freshly converted file.

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TubeTV lets you specify a certain site for the built-in search. It makes finding videos a lot easier and faster. You can search YouTube, Google Video, Google, and Dailymotion. It also allows you to launch your most recent page.

Not only does TubeTV convert files to fit your desired player (your iPod, AppleTV, iPhone) it can also add the video to iTunes in one of three default formats: Movie, Music Video, or TV Show. This comes in really handy when you don’t want to try converting or changing it later to be in the correct category. TubeTV can save the downloaded .flv file, but I have it just throw it away, then it can move the converted file to your iTunes library and delete the converted file from your download location.

TubeTV is not without its drawbacks. First, sometimes the “Download Movie” button does not work. I have clicked that thing five or six times with no luck. Then, I searched the menu area for a command to download the movie and I could find one. The only thing I found was a “Download from Firefox” and I couldn’t get that to work either. I had to restart it, which is a pain when it happens a lot. This sometimes happens when I want to download a second movie later, without quitting the application. I had to restart it after each single download. Second, I set the preferences to download four movies at a time, but only once have I been able to download two movies at a time. Sometimes, not all the time, it just waits for the first to finish downloading, then it starts the second. I can’t figure out why it waits like that.

This is an especially useful application for teachers. There is a lot of education-related content on YouTube that is suitable for teachers to show to their students. Sadly, the comments on YouTube are not appropriate for most kids (though they are probably the ones that post those comments). With TubeTV, teachers can download a video and use it in class without the “Related Videos” or comments sections showing up and forcing the teacher to adopt a deep shade of red.

TubeTV does require Perian, so you will have to download that as well.

This program is donationware, so go here and download it, then throw the recommended $15 bucks to the team at Chimoosoft to show your appreciation.

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